Barrier signals
transaction, and few models have explored so
impressively the inner dynamics of this process
as Barnlund’s, which also has useful application
to the dynamics of mass communication. See
topic guide under communication models.
Barrier signals Used as personal defence mecha-
nisms in communication situations, gestures
such as the placing of hands and arms across
the body, or folding the arms across the chest.
According to Allan and Barbara Pease in Th e
Defi nitive Book of Body Language (Orion Books,
2005) the ‘Crossed-Arms-on-Chest’ posture ‘is
universal and is decoded with the same defensive
or negative meaning almost everywhere’.
Barriers can be formed with physical objects
as well as the body. For example, as Samovar and
Porter note in Communication Between Cultures
(Wadsworth/Th omson Learning, 2004) furni-
ture can be used as a barrier to social encoun-
ters. In the business world, the classic defensive
barrier is the desk. On its role in the relationship
between the executive and this modern version
of the old moated castle and drawbridge, much
has been written – about the size and domi-
nance of the desk, its angle to the offi ce door, the
distance between the desk and the chair placed
for those who approach the boss’s territory.
Basic needs See maslow’s hierarchy of
needs.
★Bass’s ‘double action’ model of internal
news fl ow, 1969 A development of two earlier
classic models addressing the processes of
media news production – white’s gatekee-
peer model, 1950 and mcnelly’s model of
news flow, 1959. In his article, ‘Refi ning the
gatekeeper concept’ in Journalism Quarterly,
46 (1969), A.Z. Bass argues that the most
important ‘gates’ in the exercise of gatekeeping
are located within the news organization. Bass
divides the operation into a news-gathering
stage and a news-processing stage.
Writers, reporters and local editors are closer
to the ‘raw’ news, the event, than those involvedWithin and around the communicant are
cues of unlimited number, though some carry-
ing more weight – or valence – than others at
any given time. Barnlund’s model indicates
three sets of cues, each interacting upon one
another. Th ese are public cues, private cues and
behavioural cues. decoding and encoding are
visualized as part of the same spiralling process- continuous, unrepeatable and irreversible.
Public cues Barnlund divides into natural –
those supplied by the physical world without
the intervention of people, such as atmospheric
conditions, natural occurrences – and artifi cial,
those resulting from people’s modifi cation and
manipulation of their environment. For example,
Barnlund places his communicant, Mr A, in
a doctor’s waiting room which contains many
public artificial cues – a pile of magazines, a
smell of antiseptic, a picture by Joan Miro on the
wall.
Private cues emanate from sources not auto-
matically available to any other person who
enters a communicative fi eld: ‘Public and private
cues may be verbal or non-verbal in form, but
the critical quality is that they were brought into
existence and remain beyond the control of the
communicants.’ Th e third set of cues – behav-
ioural – are those initiated or controlled by the
communicant him/herself and in response to
public and private cues, coloured by the commu-
nicant’s ‘sensory-motor successes and failures in
the past, combined with his current appetites
and needs’, which will establish ‘his set towards
the environment’.
In the second diagram, intrapersonal
communication becomes interpersonal
communication, with the multiplication of
cues and the introduction of the message (M).
Barnlund emphasizes the transferability of cues.
Public cues can be transformed into private
ones, private cues may be converted into public
ones, while environmental and behavioural cues
may merge. In short, the whole process is one of
Bass’s ‘double action’ model of internal news fl ow, 1969